


Rain Down: The Rise of Gold

by Aurelius au Silva (regionalsky), regionalsky



Category: Red Rising Series - Pierce Brown
Genre: I Am Having So Much Fun, another prequel, i really love this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-01-15 00:55:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21244853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regionalsky/pseuds/Aurelius%20au%20Silva, https://archiveofourown.org/users/regionalsky/pseuds/regionalsky
Summary: Two hundred years after Mars was first colonized, Luna has become a center of commerce of the Solar System. She stretches against the reins of the American Empire and China, and whispers of freedom creep across her mottled face.Desperate to keep the peace, negotiators work out contracts between the United Nations and Luna. All seems well on the surface, but deep down, the young bioengineered humans are fuming. Bubbling. They have withstood hundreds of years of abuse, and they will not take much more.On Earth, another fight plays out. Presidential candidate John Merrywater battles Nigerian smear campaigns and Indian hacks as he attempts to maintain the integrity of an election he knows he needs to win. As a current Naval Space Officer, he senses danger on Luna, and sitting president Miller won't let him act. As the election draws nearer, Merrywater's desperation grows.What happens when gold stops bending?(A story of the Conquering)





	1. Shiny New

The protesters lined the streets of Dallas, thrusting signs up against his slow-moving car. Gold-painted faces screamed against the arms of silent police officers. Hot summer sun boiled down onto the waves of angry people.

John couldn't take his eyes off of them.

"Honey…" Carter said, brushing a lock of dark hair from his husband's face. "Don't look at them. You'll just work yourself up. There's nothing you can do."

The tinted windows were a thin barrier between John and the real world, the pounding fists and the bleeding hearts. The people out there all knew what they stood for, even if it wasn't a politically viable option. Sometimes he wished he could forget that phrase. _ Politically viable _. It was all he heard on the campaign trail.

"I just wish I could help them."

"I know," Carter cooed, "I know. And you can. But focus on your goal now, and in a few months…"

"I can help everyone." John smiled, placing a hand on Carter's. "Thank you."

The car rolled to a stop outside the white marble of the town hall. The driver, tall and burly, opened the door to the sweltering humidity.

"Good luck," Carter grinned and pressed a kiss to his husband's lips. "Go get 'em."

The speech to the cluster of college students was easy to John-- speeches had become second nature to him. The passion, the fire, it all came from authentically being him, showing just a little of the anger he felt on a daily basis.

"President Miller sits in the house like it's a castle on the hill, leaving the American educational system to rot-"

"Nigeria continues to try to wrest control of other African nations, and we cannot idly sit by while innocent people are killed-"

"Luna needs to be reined in or cut free, it cannot be treated as an American territory and not follow laws, we either need to tax imports or enforce the constitution of this great country-"

The young people cheered, reminding him of how old he was. How tired he felt. His hands were beginning to wrinkle, the years of military service beginning to show. His eyes were still bright, and the prep team made sure to cover the dark circles under them.

Afterwards, his management invited carefully vetted students to a Q&A session in a classroom. Standing behind the wooden podium, John felt like he was teaching rather than repeating the points of his campaign platform. Educational rejuvenation! Increased veterans care! Lowered taxes! Higher pensions! It was as if he spoke and the words would come true. The students clapped, eyes flickering to the holo hovering above his head, stats scrolling across the screen.

He pointed to one girl with long black hair tucked into a bun. She stood with a smile, a dark birthmark stretched across her cheek.

"Sir, it's an honor to be here," she said, taking the microphone.

John nodded. "What's your name?"

"Kimberly Atta."

The name bounced around the back of his mind, setting off vague recognition. He wanted to ask where she was from, but she was already on to her question.

"Mr. Merrywater, I think I have the question all of us want to ask," Kimberly said with a small smile.

"Well, let's hear it!" He said, glancing to Kevin, his campaign manager. He stood next to an aide, furiously swiping through a tablet. A confused frown creased his face.

The bright lights and beady camera eyes became hot and overwhelming, digging into John's skin. The girl offered a wider grin before clearing her throat.

John took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. If the girl pulled a stunt, it could be easily cut from the footage. 

"Sir, what do you intend to do with the slaves the American empire depends upon? Will you give them their freedom? Will-"

Her microphone cut off and black-clothed security guards were pushing their way through the crowd to get to her. But she kept yelling her questions. The painful, angry questions he wanted to pretend didn't exist.

"Sir, how can you ignore them? They're people too! They have heartbeats, they have thoughts, they deserve to be free-"

The security guards reached her as Kevin waved him offstage. He offered one last smile to the students, who were all waiting for his reaction. "Goodnight, and thank you for coming." A slight smattering of applause filled the classroom, more polite than anything else.

Kevin apologized profusely, offering excuses for how a protester had been allowed into his session. John waved him off. It was always a risk, and the footage was easy enough to fix.

That was what bothered him. The girl must have known that. Why had she gone to the trouble of sneaking into the session when her protests could have easily been cut off? And he still didn't know where he knew her from.

Her passion wasn't unique. There were plenty of protesters angry about whatever subject they wanted to be angry about. And while she wouldn't be charged, they had surely arrested her. So what was worth crashing his presidential campaign?

No answer presented itself in his mind. Even when he talked it over with Carter, whose light brown eyes watched him with the same attentive care they always did, there was no apparent reason.

So why did it keep bothering him?

\--

"Fourteen," he groaned through gritted teeth. Sweat tangled his white-blonde hair into stringy tendrils that fell out of his headband and onto his face. Down. Up.

"Fifteen," he whispered, arms shaking. Down. Up.

"Sixteen." His knees groaned under the stress. Down. Up.

"Seventeen." Down. Up.

"Eighteen." Down. Up.

"Hey, shiny!" A low male voice echoed from the doorway of the gym. Heavy boots echoed across the metal plating of the deck.

"Nineteen," Silenius groaned, succumbing slightly to the heavy gravity. He imagined tendrils of the imaginary force seeping out of the ground and wrapping around the bar across his shoulder, pulling him towards the ground. Down.

Once his knees were bent completely, he slowed his movement to a stop.

"Shiny, I'm fuckin' talkin to you,"

"Hi Jack," Silenius grunted, watching the older boy in the mirror. His legs trembled under the weight.

A dark glare filled Jack's face when he saw the weight Silenius held on his shoulders. In the mirror, Silenius watched him place a calloused hand on the bar.

"Come up," he commanded.

Silenius groaned, putting as much force into his legs as he could. He imagined breaking free of the tendrils, ripping them apart as he pushed towards the sky. Or space. Or whatever was above him on a moon with almost no atmosphere.

Jack leaned on the weights, forcing Silenius back down. "Come on, goldy boy. Up we go. use that superhuman strength."

Silenius forced the grimace off of his face. "I'm trying. And I could, if you'd get off my rack."

"What was that?" Jack said. "I didn't hear a 'sir'."

"We're the same rank."

"Yeah, but I wasn't born in a lab," Jack sneered, putting his full weight on the bar. In the simulated gravity of the gym, he was a full 175 pounds.

Silenius' legs buckled. He flung himself backwards, getting the bar away from his head and chest. It fell to the ground, clanking loudly against the metal plating.

He stood up carefully, watching Jack cackle. Other boys had come to watch the daily beating of the beast, Silenius laughed to himself. What a creative spectacle it was. Taunt the other. Destroy the runt.

Silenius wasn't a runt, but he wasn't like the other boys in his squadron. At his full height he was almost six and a half feet and he towered over the other junior advisors. He could lift hundreds of pounds more than them, run a mile in a few minutes, and do advanced calculus in his head. He'd been trained from birth to analyze, to strategize, to fight, and to win. He was a unnatural-born killer.

But he couldn't vote. He wasn't a citizen, because in the eyes of the law, he wasn't a person. He was a tool. Created over the course of a hundred years by Icarus Corp, the megacorporation that had patented the best methods of creating gold stock.

Jack and the other boys had left, but Silenius hadn't finished the set. Always have to finish the set. He brushed the imaginary dirt off of his trousers and picked the bar up, heaving it onto his shoulders. Down. Up.

The shower was cold and short, the way he'd been taught. Water hadn't been a precious resource since the Japanese had managed to colonize Europa, but there was no room for waste in his life.

When Silenius wanted to complain about his assignment to the Lunese advisors corps, he remembered how much worse it could be. The frigid moons of the gas giants were years away, and filled with decades of hard labor. Here, he got beat up by boys pretending to be men. He just couldn't fight back.

His small desk was filled with law books and scribbled reminders. He was to find a solution to one of the many squabbles over Lunese law. It was technically an independent colony, but it was still held to United Nations law. That was fine, but when it came to the more intricate details of business and trade, where did earthside jurisdiction end? Luna had its own governor, who answered to the United Nations security council. While originally intended to be a figurehead, the governors continued to fight for more power. Whispers of play for total independence were beginning to circulate.

Officially, Silenius did not have an opinion. His task was to work out the specifics of agricultural trade with the African union, which centered around tariffs and the legality of subsidies. While there was no reason for independent countries to be paying subsidies to each others' farmers, Luna wasn't _ technically _ an independent country…

Again and again, the squabbles came down to the poorly-defined status of Luna. And again and again, Silenius found himself growing frustrated.

His family-- or more, his bloodline-- had been developed for Luna. First to help settle her, then to build vast cities and docks across her surface. Silenius' ancestors had facilitated the development of the most powerful city in the solar system. With her rise to power, Luna needed fewer builders and more negotiators. His father, specifically, had brokered a great deal between Luna and the American Empire over military force. Of course, in the articles it was some citizen whose name was plastered on all of the docs. But anyone in power knew it was Silenius' people who did the hard work.

They were GoldBuilt(tm). Born, bred, and developed for human use to be something beyond human. Officially, they were simply bioengineered humans, but their golden hair and eyes hadn't arisen out of an accident. Silenius wasn't an accident. His suffering wasn't an accident.

He was created to suffer, trained to build and broker. But his hands and body told a different story. Silenius and his people were made to be huge, strong, and powerful. Intelligent and ruthless. To serve every purpose the humans created them for. And while his brain did the tasks they asked, his bones and muscle and skin were clearly created for one thing: war.


	2. Improvement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Silenius' friends return home. Their happy reunion is delayed.

Silenius flexed his hands, feeling the control gloves even through the fog of the simulation. His left pinky twitched as he flicked his wrist, sending his character spinning over the side of the moon. Metal vibrated around him, his own breaths rasped inside of the helmet, but outside, the battle was mostly silent. Huge pointed rounds from railguns rattled through the air, soldiers in clunky suits were sucked into space. It was clear they had little training and improper equipment to deal with war beyond gravity, but they could hardly be blamed. It was the first war fought in space.

A command sounded in his ear. "Objective: Protect the Pelican. Engage all enemies that attempt to destroy it."

The spacecraft were slow during the first Sino-American war, but the weapons were deadly. Simulated death wasn't bad, just frustrating. And Silenius didn't like losing.

He continued rotating as he flew around the moon, making microadjustments to his course as shots were fired around him. They had added radio chatter to the simulation, even after he turned it off. But the very fact that it annoyed him meant that they had turned it on again.

The soldiers weren't  _ saying _ anything, there were just shouts of random commands and the occasional scream when they started to die. At first, Silenius had listened for useful information, but it was clearly just a distractor.

A distractor. Like the heat they'd added. The itchy collar around his throat. The vibrations that shook his bones. Everything was testing him, everything was designed to make him better. There was no substitute for improvement, even when he was already the pinnacle of human intellectual and physical ability.

That's what Silenius had been told every single day of his life. There was no substitute for improvement. He was made to get better at thinking, strategizing, lifting, fighting, working--all things that the people who had created him had forgotten. It happened to every empire, when those at the top didn't remember what it meant to earn the power they wielded. They became lazy and eventually fell. The only reason it hadn't happened yet was because of the ever-lasting fight between China and America, but even that was dying out. The rulers were becoming soft.

But he. He wasn't.

The field in front of him flickered as the sun dipped behind the Earth, casting the battle in shadow. Silenius flicked the lights on his ship, illuminating a small portion of the battle as he pulled up behind the Pelican--a troop carrier. Then he hesitated, watching other ships that had momentarily disappeared light back up into his view. Silenius turned the beams of his ship off, then slid into the even darker shadow behind the troop carrier.

Below him, on the simulated Earth, he wondered which of his ancestors were being created. He came from a line of GoldBuilt™, like a line of cars or golf clubs. They were in development before the first Sino-American war, but the people who bore his predecessors were truly created during the fighting. They had ended the war, beating the Chinese into submission and establishing a port on Luna.

The troop carrier had minimal weapons, and Silenius relied on them to stay hidden. Silent rounds shot through the vacuum, sending simulated soldiers to their pixelated deaths. Weapons were still very inaccurate; it had taken human engineers years and soldiers even longer to learn how to fire with no gravity and no resistance. Silenius flexed his hands again, watching the primitive railgun at the front of his ship twitch. There was no targeting software, no assisted aim; only pure instinct and assessment.

A Chinese ship drifted into view, rotating to fire on the troop carrier as it sunk towards the surface of Luna. The mission, mostly, was not to destroy other craft. It was to puncture them. Most soldiers by now were wearing suits with some space capabilities, but the real death was losing maneuverability. Dozens of cubic meters of air at atmospheric pressure streaming out of the side of a ship could send it reeling off course, completely out of range.

The troop carrier send the approaching Chinese vessel careening when it struck true on the aft side. The Chinese ship spun out of view to cheers in Silenius' headset.

Another ship drifted into view, a dragon painted along its side. A fireship? Those weren't introduced until much later in the war. The goal was to ignite all of the released gases, incinerating some inside and initiating an explosion.

Brow wrinkled, Silenius watched as it rotated into position. The troop carrier drifted even more slowly towards the surface of the moon as worried shouts echoed in his ears. The Chinese fireship began firing, aiming to kill.

Silently, Silenius slipped out of the shadows. He took careful aim, looking for chinks in the armor. There were many joints, and if he hit one, the craft would be out of commission. If he was lucky, they hadn't seen him yet. Slowly, slowly, he rotated, until a joint was just in view.

Before he could clench a fist to fire, the screen went blue, signaling the end of the simulation. He frowned, hearing someone open the top to his unit. Silenius slipped his helmet over his head, grimacing as his eyes adjusted to the bright light.

"Ay! Sil! You ready to go?" A hoarse voice shouted into his simulation pod.

"What time is it?" He asked, blinking.

"0413." A hand banged against the metal of the pod as laughs echoed from beyond. "You been in here all night?"

"Shit," Silenius cursed. "I guess so." Grabbing the edge of the opening, he pulled himself out of the unit.

Three other shinies stood on the grated floor, fully dressed in practice gear. One girl smirked as he wiped the sweat off of his cheek. A short boy with long eyelashes offered him a quiet smile.

"Did Karrie smoke ya?" the boy with the hoarse voice grinned and popped a bubble of gum. "I betcha got hours due in there."

Silenius shrugged and imitated his lax tone. "Naw, but I mean, she prob'ly would. She gots the shit out for me." He grinned and grasped the other boy's tattooed hand. "It's great to see you, Goode."

Goode nodded. "Somehow we survived the fuckhole that is the peace summit."

"Do you-"

"Are you two done?" The girl scowled, crossing her corded arms. "I'm jacked up on eppie and I want to get to the gym while I'm shaking."

Silenius shook his head. "You know, Marcella, one of these days, you're going to stop your heart."

"Only idiots take epinephrine shots," Goode chimed in, happy to tease the girl. "It fucks with your system. Probably why you're such a bitch all the time."

She made a face. "Probably why I kick your ass all the time, too." Flicking her yellow hair out of her face, Marcella turned away from the boys. "See you in the gym."

Before Marcella could leave them, shiny black boots marched into the room. Immediately, the shinies snapped to attention, faces sliding into blank slates. A thin woman with dark hair pulled into a strict bun strode into the room after the guards, ignoring the shinies dressed in the pads and armor of training gear. She went straight to Silenius, who wore a white flight suit.

"Junior Economic Advisor Lune14, you have a new assignment, effective immediately," the woman said, handing Silenius a thin sheet of glass. On it, data swirled that made his tired brain spin. "Report to conference room alpha-zero-three-echo-kilo."

Silenius nodded.

The woman looked him up and down, a sneer on her lips. "Pay more attention to your pager in the future. And change."

There was nothing to say, so Silenius nodded again. The head advisor didn't listen or care about his excuses. Advisor Karrie was a straight arrow of a woman, and Silenius respected that. He fought back the annoyance rising in his stomach, the exhaustion that clouded his thoughts. Of course he would change. And he'd only ignored his pager because he was training, and because it was the middle of the night. 

Life never slowed down on Luna. And, because they were set to American standard time, it was only 5pm in Beijing. The world was always awake, and Silenius always had to be ready to deal with it.

Silenius was not greeted when he entered the blue-lit room. His high-collared tunic was charcoal colored, duller than the crisp white the other boys and girls wore. They clutched tablets and sipped coffee, blinking sleep out of their eyes as they wondered what they'd been woken for.

Years earlier, Silenius would have envied their natural hair, their unmarked hands. He would have wished to be among them as a friend, an ally, maybe even a leader. Sometimes, he wondered what life would have been like if he had been born as one of them, free to do whatever he chose. Would he have been powerful? Meaningful? Remembered in history books?

He glanced down at his own hands, the winged pyramid of Icarus Corps permanently marked in his skin. The tattoo was renewed every year, along with a tracking chip that was hidden under his skin. He had sensors in his lungs, in his brain, in his heart, and a wire in his cheek. It was remote controlled, designed to give a lethal shock of electricity if it was ever required.

For Silenius, it would never be required. He would do his work, and he would do it well. Flicking through the feed on his tablet, he tried to deduce what their assignment was. There were articles about John Merrywater's campaign, a few stories mentioning the riots in Western America, an opinion on Indian fracking… nothing new.

The other junior advisors went silent. Silenius looked up to see Advisor Karrie pulling up images on the screen in the front of the room. He put his tablet down.

"This is Mongolia," Advisor Karrie said, pointing to an image of dusty plains. "And these are grain shipments. Headed south over the border."

"To China?" One of the junior advisors asked. Stupid question.

"Yes. Along with millions of dollars worth of beef, potatoes, and other basic foodstuffs." Advisor Karrie glanced around the room, eyes dark with the early hour. "Is China having a famine right now?"

A chorus of nos went through the room. Silenius stayed silent.

"There has also been an increase in imports of bulk aluminum, airplane grade. There are reports of cobalt and molybdenum being shipped under fake names. What do these go to support?"

"An army?" One girl asked.

"China already has the largest standing army in the world. What are they preparing for?" Advisor Karrie snapped. The room was mostly silent as the advisors flipped through the images she'd dropped to them.

"A war? With the US?" 

"No," the advisor said. "Any other guesses?"

A war with the US would be fruitless, and China already controlled the parts of Earth that it wanted to. The aircraft-grade aluminum meant aircraft, and the food meant a huge increase in the scale of their army. Rare earth metals were electronics, and if they were snuck in it was likely military technology.

There was only one viable, logical, and reasonable option. He put his tablet down.

"It's an attack," Silenius whispered. "An attack on Luna."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the long wait was because I didn't want to write something that wasn't worth this story. I finally have something I am proud of bringing into existence, and I don't want to fuck it up.


	3. Freedom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tensions rise on Luna and Earth as the Chinese prepare for war.

John was up late again, papers sprawled across his desk amongst many cups of coffee. This wasn't new to Carter. It was one of the duties of being married to an important man in the American Empire.

The clock ticked slowly as Carter sipped his tea in the living room, paging through a book on songbirds. The door creaked as John padded onto the soft rug, eyes dark and heavy.

Carter looked up with a small encouraging smile. John stared at the white and green threads of the rug, a weight on his shoulders.

"What is it?" He asked quietly, knowing his husband wouldn't talk unless prompted.

"I'm not sure," John said with a sigh, still staring at the ground. "I think I know. But what I think is too drastic...I'm not sure if I'm overreacting."

Carter set his tea on the simple coffee table. He'd built it himself from an old cherry tree in their backyard. "Maybe sleep could help?"

John shook his head. "This can't wait for sleep. I think--well, I think there's Chinese troop movements all over Asia, most worryingly in Omsk, Shenzen, Bangkok, Baku, Jaipur…"

Taking John's soft, square hand, Carter massaged small circles into the meat of his palm. John let some of the tension slip out of his shoulders. The cicadas hummed outside the window, mixing with the whispers of the crickets.

"I know you can't tell me everything that's going on," Carter said quietly, searching the lines of his husband's face for the years they'd spent together. "But I'm here. And I always will be. Okay?"

John nodded before taking his hand away. "Okay," he whispered before retreating to his study, leaving Carter to the crickets.

\--

It had been thirteen hours since they'd first been brought the news, and the group still hadn't accomplished anything. Silenius sat in the corner as always, slipping through the newest reports on Chinese activity.

Sometimes he wondered why the designers at Icarus Corps had decided to make them all gold colored. It seemed silly, almost too pretentious. At times he wondered if it actually was a nod to the obsession with the Aryan race people sometimes had, or if that was just fanatics on the internet.

Why create a line of people so genetically superior it was obvious from even a glance? When Silenius was bored or annoyed, which normally came together, he analyzed. When the idiots he'd been assigned to were stuck in a gridlock, he thought about the deepest truths of the world.

Maybe this one wasn't so deep. Maybe the designers of humans knew they were also designers of a product that needed to be solved. The fact that Silenius was far physically superior to most citizens was unnecessary for his job, which was to conduct studies and report. Quietly, from the corner of the room. Some GoldBuilt had trouble staying in the shadows, but Silenius knew that was where the work was done.

Finally, the others in the room gave him space to share his opinion. As much as they hated it, it was normally his ideas that solved the problems they were given. As a group of junior advisors, their issues really weren't that difficult. They were just stupid.

The problem of the night (now well into the mid-afternoon) was sanctions against the Chinese government. In classic American passive-aggressive style, the president-elect had blocked most important shipments to China and threatened the rest of the solar system into doing the same. The question was to what extent Luna was going to participate in those sanctions, being kind of an American protectorate and kind of not.

Luna produced very little other than space dust. It mostly functioned as a trading port and a military base, a place no one was from yet everyone had been to. Almost all shipments to and from other celestial bodies went through Luna, and, with Earth still as the center of the solar system, that meant most trading that happened occured in Luna's ports. The military bases also held the Space Force Academy, a supposedly nonpartisan association that was clearly held and run by the allies of the United States.

If Luna decided to put sanctions on Chinese trade, that also included Chinese traders. Directly, that would affect thousands of people, but with sanctions came racism. The workers that lived on Luna, Mars, Deimos, Phobos, and the other new colonies would be ostracized, meaning millions would be left in the cold. Luna would be cutting off all shipments to and from China, which meant China wouldn't be trading with any colonies in the solar system.

The problem was that, for all their thinly-veiled autocratic rule, the Chinese were good at mass-producing important technology. Much of the technology that kept Luna running was designed and produced in Chinese factories, much cheaper than Western corporations. Mars was mostly government-funded, so they could afford the hefty costs that came with the military-industrial complex in America. Luna was a patchwork of thrown-together ports, barracks, and workshops, haphazardly built with the cheapest technology available.

As long they were breathing. But even the oxygenators and water reclaiming plants broke, with parts only available in China. Something as important as live-supporting technology wasn't given to the junior advisors, though. They'd been assigned raw metal shipments.

Raw metal mining operations were just beginning to take place in the asteroid belts of the solar system, but many still operated at a net loss. Even then, their products were sent to the shipyards of Mars, where the second Terran fleet was being built. Mars was being quickly stripped of its useful metals, which mostly included iron and aluminium.

Luna used very little raw metal, but it oversaw the transportation of rare earth metals to Mars. Important metals like iridium, cadmium, beryllium, lead, cobalt, and gold, were shipped to the factories of Mars to support the fledging technology sector. The Martians were at the front lines of designing the fastest and deadliest spaceships, mostly because the combined forces of Earth spent money on terraforming and colonizing Venus. The stormy planet was seen as the new frontier for human habitation, with the distant moons of the gas giants still too distasteful for the general population.

So what to do with the raw metal shipment sanctions?

Jack, one of the other economic advisors, had asked the question to the room, but Silenius knew it meant it was time for him to talk. The others had given up.

He felt the hate sizzle against his skin as he spoke from his corner. "Our solution is simple when we consider the overall objective," he said, placing coffee he had not touched on the table next to him.

"Yes, shiny, we've all read the orders," Jack snapped, slouching down into a chair. "Protect Lunese interests, consider the relationship with the American Empire, possible Chinese retaliation, freezing the Nigerian cobalt market as possible consequence… whatever. This just tells us--"

"It tells us everything," Silenius said, careful to keep his face a calm mask. His charcoal tunic scratched against his neck as he tipped his head to the side. "The issue is providing the Chinese a market to sell to anda way to finance a war against us."

"That hasn't been confirmed yet," a girl with orange hair and an obnoxious existence chimed in. "All that is official is that the Americans are threatening sanctions for any breach of the Wuhan treaty."

"Yes, Marigold, we've already been over this," Jack snarled. "We are just preparing to react to direct American orders to impose sanctions."

"Which will come soon," Silenius added, tired of their bickering. He was already bored, slipping back into careful analysis of a small piece of the universe. Why give him gold eyes? Were the designers just showing off?

The room had slipped into silence again. It was his turn to speak. "When the Americans order us to impose economic sanctions on the Chinese, the best course of action is to cooperate fully. The issue is not looking weak on the world stage. Actually, deferring to American will makes it more likely they will defend us wholeheartedly when the Chinese  _ do _ come. 

"Our main issue is the strength of the Chinese. Officially, as the United Nations Protectorate of Luna, we have no army, no navy. We only have the academy here, which we all know is fully loyal to the Americans and their allies." Silenius looked around the room, composed entirely of young people from those countries. No Nigerians, no citizens from the fallen Indian empire, no Russians, no Chinese. Only the countries that followed President Miller like sick, starving puppies.

That was the biggest weakness of humans. Their fear. It was what separated Silenius from them the most. He was a creature of logic, choices, action. Citizens operated on fear of loss--losing their comfortable lives, their families, their lives. Silenius had never had any of those things. Nothing had ever been his own, except his mind, which no one could read, see, or turn. His thoughts were always his own, even if he shared them to a room of children terrified of failure.

"So…" Jack traced a finger along the rim of his mug. "The best solution is to comply with the Americans completely?"

Silenius nodded. "It protects our interests. It doesn't matter if the Nigerian economy collapses for a bit, they aren't huge consumers of our goods. Cutting the Chinese off from a main flow of income is best for Luna."

He sat back, knowing his work was done. Oh, sure, the others would draw on their tablets and talk about articles for another hour or so, but he knew his solution had stuck in their heads. They'd repeat it shamelessly to their director, pretending it had been their carefully developed plan from hours of work.

To save them time, Silenius dropped the necessary files to Marigold's tablet. Studies on previous UN sanctions, Chinese rare earth markets, and Lunese trading schedules supported his argument better than any verbose bullshit they could write. The sooner they submitted it, the sooner he could go to his quarters and sleep.

When Silenius finally returned to his room, a piece of paper sat on his desk. He rolled his eyes. A handwritten letter. How archaically thoughtful of her.

This was not a time to think about Marcella. Fighting the smile that tried to push its way onto his face, he took a shower. Cold, as always. His silvery hair dried quickly in the thin, heavily recycled air. He was alone in the bathroom, bright fluorescents reflecting nothing but his own skin back to him.

He hated the tattoos on his skin. So dark, so ugly. The symbol of Icarus Corps was burned in a place that would remind him any time he made anything that he did not even make himself. They had created him, developed him, built him into the man he was. 

The wings meant freedom, a simple symbol reminiscent of the myth most had read but few understood. The corporation stood for the liberation of mankind from Earth, a goal that could only be achieved through the development of a stronger, smarter, sturdier shepherd. But the black on his hands reminded him of how true his freedom really was--yes, he lived a better life than those had before him, but if he tried to fight for a better one, he'd fly straight into the sun. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you've read this, thanks for hanging on. writing this is a huge, daunting thing that scares me every time I sit down to try to put life in it. I love this story and characters and really, I just want Pierce to take over from me and write a damn prequel about the Conquering already.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow my blood is boiling this is SO MUCH FUN to write.  
As always, I love your thoughts.


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